The present invention relates to a method to provide information in an Internet telecommunication network from a server to a terminal a server and a memory means realizing such a method respectively, and an Internet telecommunication network.
Such a method to provide information from a server to a terminal is already known in the art. Indeed, one of the best known applications on the Internet today is the world wide web. The web was originally designed as a collection of pages that refer to additional information instead of copying the additional information into the pages. This is also described in the book ‘TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols’ written by W. Richard Stevens and published by Way, Reading, Mass. 01867, with reference number ISBN 0-201-63346-9, 11th printing February, 1998. In Chapter 30, ‘Other TCP/IP Applications’ describes additional TCP/IP applications supporting many implementations. Paragraph 30.4 of this chapter lists tools that exist to locate files and documents. The World Wide Web permits browsing of a large, worldwide set of services and documents using a tool called hypertext. Information is displayed comprising certain keywords that are highlighted. A selection of one of the keywords provides more information on those keywords. Indeed, the reference can be on any other host connected to the Internet with a web server application running on it. The reference is of the form of an URL Uniform Resource Locator that is placed into the web page. The user just has to select this URL after which the web application on his local host makes a connection with the new web server and downloads the required file.
Thanks to the definition of Hypertext Markup Language HTML, publishers are allowed to specify the layout of the text. It is therefore up to the application itself to do the interpretation of the downloaded files and to present them in an appropriate way.
An application to download such Hypertext Markup Language page is Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP, which is a protocol with very simple commands. In e.g. a GET command only the file and the path indication are mentioned.
As it is clear from Chapter 30 of the above mentioned book, the use of Internet of HyperText Transfer Protocol HTTP is usual over the known Transmission Control Protocol over the known Internet Protocol TCP/IP.
The performance of Transmission Control Protocol over Internet protocol TCP/IP is however limited by connection set-up. Indeed, when a user requests an HTML-page from a server via its browser, usually different files are to be transferred from the server to the user. Besides e.g. a text file also other files such as e.g. image files, style sheet files, etc. are to be transferred.
It has to be explained here that such an HTML page is referred to in the claims as ‘information’. Another implementation of ‘providing information’ is realized with resource description framework RDF.
First frame information is downloaded e.g. a text file for HTML or a Document for RDF. This frame information is transmitted to the terminal upon reception by the server of a frame information request that is forwarded by the terminal. Such frame information comprises references towards other information, in the claims referred to as ‘referred information’ e.g. a reference to a style sheet file of such a text file for HTML-page applications or a reference to a resource of such a framework for resource description framework application.
In the event of e.g. an HTML-page downloading application, as soon as a text-file is transmitted by the server to the browser, different other files are transmitted from the server to the browser upon requests of the browser. In this way, one connection is required for each file, which means that each file requires the overhead of a connection set-up. An improvement is reached by reusing a connection sequentially for the same HTML-page but for different files i.e. “keep alive” concept. However, the number of connections is not optimized as it is predefined in the browser.
It has to be remarked here that the mentioned actions of the terminal are usually executed by a browser installed on the terminal. In this way, a not limited list of steps is provided hereby to give some idea how a web browser works in the event when a user clicks on a link of an HTML page:                the browser determines a Uniform Resource Locater URL; and        the browser asks e.g. a domain name server to translate the URL into an Internet protocol address IP; and        the domain name server replies with an IP address; and        the browser establishes a Transfer Control Protocol connection to, usually, port 80, using this IP address; and        the server is listening to this port and acknowledges this connection request; and        the browser then sends an Hypertext Transfer Protocol GET request to retrieve the file; and        the server sends a text file and for instance related image files to which the text file is referring; and        the Transfer Control Protocol connection might be released; and        the browser interprets the Hypertext Mark Up Language HTML information and displays the page in the window of the terminal.        
If this page contains a link to an embedded object e.g. an image or a JAVA applet, the same mechanism is repeated.
If this page contains a link to a page of another server also this mechanism is repeated to this server as soon as the user clicks on the link.